Seonwoo Yoon is a DPhil student in Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, and a member of Clarendon Scholars’ Association at the University of Oxford. She holds a bachelor’s degree in education and economics from Korea University, and MPA with high honours from Yonsei University, Republic of Korea. Her dissertation was a comparative analysis of the effects of family policy on women’s responsibility burden of unpaid work.
She has over four years of research and work experience in Feminist & Human Rights NGOs as a project intern and journalist; in a policy laboratory, research institutions, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Republic of Korea as a research assistant. She has broadened the scope of her research interests based on those practical experiences, and now explores substantial changes at the local and individual level.
Seonwoo’s doctoral project is concerned with the politics of care policy for adults, which inquires why and how certain adults are excluded in the entire care policy processes and when transitions from exclusion to inclusion can happen. She aims to conduct both comparative studies and research in Korea with a frame/discourse analysis. The first two papers consist of comparative studies which examine normative assumptions regarding target groups of care in social policy literature, and what ‘Cash-for-Care (CfC)’ policy design talks about care needs and (in)dependency. Two other empirical papers examine the case of South Korea in order to contextualise why and how contested concepts regarding care generate feed-forward effects on community care policy implementation and the development of feminist movements.
